Wide resolutions, or standard?

I'm making this post in the interest of enlightening current and future PDA users about the new trend of WVGA and WQVGA. With the age of Wide screen devices, its important to understand the limitations.

It is important for now to understand the implications of what the new product lines mean to us, especially for hardcore PDA gamers.

First off, when third party games are created, they are usually created for the standard VGA or QVGA resolution. Now, QVGA resolution games will work on VGA (except for a minority) while VGA games will not work on QVGA.

With a Wide resolution device, whether WVGA or WQVGA, these games or applications no longer function at all, or if they do, leave a wide black gap or even worse, you could see the background of your Today screen.

For comparison, it would be like a game running on three quarters on your PC screen.

When this happens, the game will either crash, or hang your entire device, forcing a soft reset.

However, that being said and done, a WVGA or WQVGA does have advantages, such as a superb multimedia device, especially for movies. Also there are new game developers that are coming out with games for Wide resolution devices. But unfortunately, while these are big timers such as Gameloft, their games are sadly rip offs.

Seems to me like its a trend that JAVA games are being ported from normal mobile phones into windows mobile format. And the gameplay and all are exactly as you would expect from a java game! I woudnt mind paying the usual 3 bucks or so for a java game, but such games are being charged at least around 10USD per game! In the good old days, such games are exclusive PDA games, but now we're paying such a high price for what is essentially a JAVA game! You'd want to be careful, and proprely get a demo for the game before paying for it, especially stuff from Gameloft. From experience, Gameloft does have good games, for a java game, but its usually completed within an hour. Taking into account the price you pay, its not really worth it. So that being said and done, gaming on WVGA or WQVGA is still rather crippled.

Another important point to not is the lack of hardware buttons on WVGA and WQVGA screens. Companies such as HTC seem to be aiming for estatics rather than actual function. While touch sensitive like "buttons" are admittedly much more stylish and sleek, but most 3rd party games NEED such buttons in order to play. A fine example would be Worms World Party. Hence, the games that MAY function on WVGA or WQVGA now have a new challenge. They have to be totally unreliant on hardware buttons, or they'll be unplayable. QWERTY is not considered hardware buttons as most games cant use them anyway.

These are the things you should take in mind when considerring new products such as HTC Touch HD, or any other wide resolution PDAs with lack of hardware buttons.

Perhaps when we see more games designed to be totally Wide resolution compatible or less hardkeys reliant. But right now, as far as i can tell, HTC has downgraded their new product lines in order to specifically compete with Iphone.

They are probably targetting people who have never used PDAs before, usual handphone users. Which is why since Touch Diamond, most PDA owners are totally newbie PDA users. Before this, most of the PDA owners are people who upgraded their current model. Personally, i'd stick with a standard VGA or QVGA reso with nice hardware keys, until the day i find games such as POWDER, Worms, The Quest, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, Call of Duty 2, and more uninteresting.

The Iphone, while being a newer platform, has actually more gaming possibilities than the new WVGA / WQVGA devices with no hardkeys.


This is Baronic, signing off